Protesters, loyalists clash in Yemen

On A KNIFE EDGE:：One protester was killed in Aden when police fired shots to disperse a demonstration, the first confirmed death since the protests started

Reuters, SANA’A

Fri, Feb 18, 2011 - Page 6

More than a thousand protesters clashed with government loyalists in Yemen yesterday on the seventh straight day of demonstrations demanding the end of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 32-year rule.

Clashes broke out in the capital Sana’a after groups of government loyalists armed with daggers and batons confronted about 1,500 protesters, prompting police to fire warning shots in the air, witnesses said.

“The people want the fall of the president, the people want the fall of the regime,” chanted the protesters.

Dozens were wounded and carried away from the scene.

Witnesses said police appeared to have lost control of the crowds and withdrew from the streets as the rival camps hurled rocks at each other. A police source said riot police were being sent in.

Saleh is a US ally against a resurgent al-Qaeda wing that has launched attacks on foreign and regional targets in one of the Arab world’s poorest countries.

A third of the population in Yemen faces chronic hunger and 40 percent live on less than US$2 a day. The country is struggling to cement a truce with Shiite rebels in the north and to stifle an increasingly violent southern separatist movement.

Analysts say any uprising in Yemen, neighbor to top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, is unlikely to see sudden government collapse, but widespread unrest could unfold slowly and lead to more bloodshed in a country where one in two people own a gun.

Saleh may prove harder to topple than former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, said Khaled Fattah, a Yemen academic at Scotland’s St Andrews University, contrasting the centralization of state power in Egypt with the fragmented nature of authority in Yemen.

“The continuity of protests, however, may put pressure on Saleh’s government to offer more political concessions to the southern [secessionist] movement. Such concessions might lead to the adoption of a federal system,” Fattah said.

Trying to calm three weeks of protests, Saleh has made concessions such as a promise to step down when his term ends in 2013 and a vow not to let his son inherit power.

Since the opposition coalition accepted Saleh’s offer of national dialogue a week ago, spontaneous anti-Saleh protests have broken out. They are smaller than the opposition-organized rallies that drew tens of thousands at their peak.

The latest demonstrations, organized by text messaging and social networks rather than any political party, have been countered by pro-government crowds ready to use violence.

One protester was killed in the southern port city of Aden on Wednesday, when police fired shots to disperse a demonstration, the first confirmed death since the unrest began.

Saleh has been touring provinces trying to rally support and sent his vice president to Aden yesterday to head a committee to investigate the violence used in protests the day before.

In Aden, police fired in the air, but failed to break up hundreds of people at a sit-in around Aden’s city hall yesterday in a protest against police treatment of demonstrators.

Muslim preachers loyal to Saleh have also stepped into the political fray in a country where religious and tribal allegiances are often stronger than political ones.

Abdel Majid al-Zindani, a religious leader in Sana’a, yesterday called for the formation of a unity government.

“Religious thinkers have determined, after studying the results of the situation in Tunisia and Egypt, that Yemen should establish a unity government to give the people the right to decide who governs,” he told reporters.

However, Zindani said his proposal did not include a change in president and said Yemenis should wait for elections in 2013.